News Story

Notch: Level of attention "started zapping the fun out" of 0x10c

Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson has just posted a new blog discussing the state of his "quite ambitious" 0x10c project, which he mentally shelved as 'on ice' after losing the warp drive to continue it.

0x10c would have been his third "omg you can do anything" title, but pressure built too high and it wasn't so fun anymore. Project Trillek is "absolutely amazing".

Notch doesn't want to pursue large games, as he once did, but would rather dive into smaller projects. He doesn't want to become another "under delivering visionary".

"Because I enjoy talking to the players and community, and possibly because I will gladly share my opinions on things, I became recognized and got loads of fans. And then my tweets started becoming gaming news," blogged Notch, referring to his mega ascendance to fame after Minecraft creeped (reference!) up on the gaming world.

"About a year ago, I started working on a third “omg you can do anything” game, called 0x10c. It was supposed to be a space game about actually being in character in space rather than playing as a space ship like you do in most space games. You’d try to keep your ship live while shooting aliens with laser guns, putting out fires and programming your own virtual computer in the ship. It was quite ambitious, but I was fairly sure I could pull it off."

"And besides, if I failed, so what? A lot of my prototypes fail way before they get anywhere at all," he continued.

"What I hadn’t considered was that a lot more people cared about my games now. People got incredibly excited, and the pressure of suddenly having people care if the game got made or not started zapping the fun out of the project. I spent a lot of time thinking about if I even wanted to make games any more."

"I guess I could just stop talking about what I do, but that doesn’t really come all that natural to me. Over time I kinda just stopped working on it, and then eventually decided to mentally file it as “on ice” and try doing some smaller things. Turns out, what I love doing is making games. Not hyping games or trying to sell a lot of copies."

"I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak."

The community has decided to pick up the 0x10c torch, although it will be built from scratch with none of Notch's code. It's called Project Trillek and Mr. Minecraft is very much a fan of it himself.

"Some people in the 0x10c community decided to work together to make their own version of their game, called Project Trillek. I find this absolutely amazing," he enthused.

"I want to play this game so much, but I am not the right person to make it. Not any more. I’m convinced a new team with less public interest can make a vastly superior game than what I would make."

Notch is sticking with smaller, more exciting projects. "I want to do smaller games that can fail. I want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak," he said. "So that’s what I’m going to do."